The present invention relates to devices for mounting snowplows onto bucket type front-end loaders for temporary operation of the snowplow.
Public highway maintenance departments are frequently faced with a need to utilize common equipment for auxiliary or secondary purposes. Often, severe winter snowstorms require use of all vehicles at a department's disposal to expedite snow removal. Similary, when a truck that would normally mount a snowplow is mechanically disabled, the detached snowplow is affixed to any available vehicle. Further, when all the highway snowplows have been deployed, it is often convenient to employ a spare plow for local plowing of the department's yard or for slower-paced, tidying-up work, e.g., around fire hydrants, after the highway plows have moved through.
The most common vehicle for such alternative use is the large, front-end bucket loader. Because virtually all highway departments have front-end loaders for earth moving and truck filling operations, a variety of attachments have been designed to enable the loaders to perform numerous secondary tasks. Some of these attachments, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,597,205, are specifically designed to mount a snowplow onto the bucket of a front-end loader.
Although previous snowplow mounting attachments allow use of front-end loaders for temporary snowplowing, they suffer from many deficiencies which are overcome by the present invention.
The most common problem associated with prior attachments is that they typically involve close-tolerance securing mechanisms that include many moving parts. Experience has demonstrated that, under winter use conditions involving repeated exposure to snow, ice, sand and salt, such complicated mechanisms are subject to jamming, freezing and rusting. Consequently, the moving parts often become inoperable, or, even worse, break under excess force applied in attempting to free them.
Many snowplow mounting attachments necessitate bolting or welding fixtures or making modifications to the loader's bucket to assist in securing the plow to the loader. Frequently, however, such changes to the loader will impair normal loader operation. Invariably, such changes involve significant costs in manpower in applying the fixtures or making the modifications.
Most known snowplow mounting attachments rigidly affix the plow to the loader. Accordingly, because the plow blade s well forward of the loader's wheels, the blade does not efficiently track the vertical contours of the plowed surface. Additionally, current mounting attachments are not routinely interchangeable between the wide variety of large highway plows, nearly all of which have standard mounting brackets.
Accordingly, it is the primary object of the present invention to provide an improved snowplow mounting assembly for front-end loaders that utilizes no moving parts.
It is another object to provide a mounting assembly which securely affixes a snowplow to a front-end loader without adding fixtures or making modifications to the loader.
It is another object to provide a mounting assembly that efficiently tracks the vertical contours of the plowed surface.
It is yet another object to provide a mounting assembly that is easily interchangeable between the wide variety of large highway plows that have standard mounting brackets.
The above and other objects and advantages of this invention will become more readily apparent when the following description is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.